Date archives "January 2012"

Excerpted from Byrne Hobart: “Most popular web-based businesses are deflationary. They substitute expensive forms of content consumption for cheap ones, they make it logistically easier to deliver discounts to people who will respond to them, and they create numerous financially cheap forms of social status. As more activity moves on to the web, the main… Continue reading →

AJ fisher defines the sensor commons as “A future state whereby we have data available to us, in real time, from a multitude of sensors that are relatively similar in design and method of data acquisition and that data is freely available.” As a population we are deciding that governments and civic planners no longer… Continue reading →

Michel Bauwens: I very often appreciate Zizek’s radical thought and insights, including in the excerpts reproduced below. However, notions like workers and bourgeoisie, used here below in the context of a ‘salaried bourgeoisie’, in a non-structural way, strikes me as particularly unproductive. Equating precarious knowledge workers with the notion of being part of the ruling… Continue reading →

Source: MaryLynn Schiavi For NJ Press Media What do police officers, military veterans and mothers have in common? They all fall into the category of those who help and support others — but often, do not get the help and support that they need, according to Cherie Castellano, the driving force behind the creation of… Continue reading →

* Making Worlds: An OWS Forum on the Commons, to be organized February 16-18, 2012. organized by members of the Empowerment & Education Committee of OWS “The Occupy movement is entering a new phase, one in which many of us feel the need of combining a renewed engagement with direct actions and mobilizations with a… Continue reading →

Excerpted from a reflection on the logic behind the organizing of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, from Jake Stanning: “The splitting tendency within the left is partly down to what we might call ideology-led organising. Politically-minded people have often been suspicious of those with different ideologies, even suspecting that somehow those with different beliefs will… Continue reading →

Excerpted from a discussion by Marc Dangeard: ‘My experience of Social Capital market is that it is a very skewed market today, which reminds me of feudalism: – on one side you have foundations, with a few managers in charge money from people who live from their investments and have assigned some of that money… Continue reading →

This book comes recommended by Boing Boing: * Book: From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg. by John Naughton. Quercus Books. 2012 “Our society has gone through a weird, unremarked transition: we’ve gone from regarding the Net as something exotic to something that we take for granted as a utilitarian necessity, like mains electricity or running water. In… Continue reading →

A commons movement is growing in Europe, this is one of its expressions: “The crisis affecting the global economy and consequently the Euro during these months requires a radically different response from those actually envisaged and carried out. The way Europe and European governments and electors will handle the Greek crisis will set an important… Continue reading →

A call to aim at the big targets by Smári McCarthy Mosquitoes with Cannons Last week, we won. The Internet, long seen as a mostly harmless collection of kitten aficionados and porn fiends, fought epic battle of self preservation against a substantially better organized enemy, one with much greater experience of that field of… Continue reading →

Excerpted from Malcolm Harris: ‘Kinsella, the director of the Center for The Study of Innovative Freedom, argues that intellectual property regimes are illegitimate because, since ideas are non-scarce (abundant), they require legislation and a state to protect them: “[S]carce resources that you need to use as means need to be owned by you. This is… Continue reading →

Excerpted from William Gamson: “The single most important thing to understand about the Occupy movement[deleted plural ending] is that it is primarily a movement about cultural change, not institutional and policy change. Cultural change means changing the nature of political discourse and the various spheres in which it is carried on, especially mass media. Changing… Continue reading →

What does a bill like PIPA/SOPA mean to our shareable world? At the TED offices, Clay Shirky delivers a proper manifesto — a call to defend our freedom to create, discuss, link and share, rather than passively consume.

Excerpted from Harold Jarche: “The big shift for me in the past decade has been in weaving a network that brings me diversity of opinions and depth of knowledge. I am constantly following/unfollowing on Twitter in an attempt at optimal filtering, which is an impossible but worthwhile goal. I look for experts who share their… Continue reading →

Excerpted from a discussion by BARBARA EHRENREICH AND JOHN EHRENREICH: (apologies, we lost the source indication) ““Liberal elite” was always a political category masquerading as a sociological one. What gave the idea of a liberal elite some traction, though, at least for a while, was that the great majority of us have never knowingly encountered… Continue reading →

Book: April Carter. People Power and Political Change. Routledge, 2012 Paul Rogers: “Looks rigorously yet sympathetically at the many examples of people power over the past forty years: from Iran in the 1970s, through Latin America, Asia and east-central Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, to the Arab world in 2010-11. The main focus of… Continue reading →